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Friday, August 30, 2013

From Deja Mi to WedPics: Focus, Focus, Focus

The second in a series
of articles that highlight companies selected to Demo at the CED Tech Venture
Conference 2013, by Ann Revell-Pechar.

Focus is more than how you take a good picture – it’s also
how you grow a great company. Just ask WedPics’ Justin Miller.

Three years ago, Justin started a scrappy little company
called Deja Mi featuring a photo sharing application that was supported by big
name partners. He grew it to 30,000 users, with no acquisition cost. But the
more he studied what people did with these photos, the more he realized that a
vertical niche might be the key to serious growth.

Where are there a lot of photos being taken? At weddings,
and at all of the festivities that start with the engagement and end
post-honeymoon. Averaged out, there are about 6000 weddings every day in the
United States. If 100 people are invited, 30% might take pictures. That’s 1.8 million people taking pictures of
wedding-related activities every day. And then, they share the best shots.

So Miller knuckled down, brought development in-house,
raised a little money, and created WedPics.
This free photo sharing app essentially becomes a digital photo album, a
central and interactive repository for all the pictures taken by guests, from
the engagement party until the welcome home, post-honeymoon reception. It
becomes each couple’s private social network to share content related to their
wedding.

WedPics went live one
year ago, in August 2012. They already have more than 400,000 users, and have
created albums for more than over 100,000 couples. Couples are seeing, on
average, 25 guests posting their photos to the site. With this kind of growth,
we wondered where WedPics would go next.

“We’re focused on user acquisition and market domination,”
said Miller. “Our goal is to capture 10% of the market by the end of 2013. As
of June, we’d surpassed 5% so we’re well on our way.”

To his point: In August of 2013, WedPics began their first
test for monetizing the site through a strategic partnership with Raleigh’s own
LuLu. They’ve integrated the WedPics website with
printed photo books. And soon the company hopes to finalize a partnership with
Kodak and Target to print one-off photos at any local Target using the app.

WedPics is the fastest growing company in this vertical, in
term of user numbers. It’s highly viral, and the fans are big fans… not just
users. Brides are vocal and their input helps the company evolve the product.

Miller doesn’t shy away from what being in NC has meant to
his company’s growth this far. “The best thing about this region is the
networks here. We have great developers that allow us to operate “leanly”, and
we were able to identify investors such that our $1.1 Million Series A round
was oversubscribed. North Carolina is a place companies can grow and blossom.”

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